Ross Poldark (26 page)

“Oh,” said Ross. So he was not to be rid of his charge after all.

“I believe she think to reform Fathur. She believe she can make him tee-tottle. That's where she’ll be mistook, I reckon.”

The two men, having sawed for a few minutes, solemnly walked away to the end of the rope and began to pull. Ross joined them and added his weight. A perverse spirit within him was glad that he was not to have the easy way of meeting the scurrilous gossip. Let them talk till their tongues dropped out.

But surely Elizabeth wouldn’t believe such a story.

He gave an extra hard tug on the rope, and it snapped where it had been knotted to a branch of the tree. He sat down with the other two men. Garrick, who had been out on a private rabbit hunt and missing the fun, came rushing down the valley and gambolled about the three men, licking Jud's face as Jud got to his knees.

“Dang the blathering whelp!” said Jud, spitting.

“It's poor stuff you rely on,” said Ross. “Where did you find it?”

“In the library—”

“Twas soggy at one end,” said Demelza. “The rest is sound.”

She picked up the rope and began to climb the tree like a playful cat.

“Come back!” Ross said.

“She put en up thur first time,” said Jud, aiming a kick at Garrick.

“She had no business to. But now—” Ross went nearer. “Demelza! Come down!”

She heard him this time and stopped to peer through the branches, “What's to do? I’m all but there.”

“Then tie it at once and come down.”

“I’ll loop en over at the next branch.” She put her foot up and climbed a few feet higher.

“Come down!”

There was an ominous crack.

“Look for yourself!” shouted Jud.

Demelza paused and looked down, more than ever like a cat now which had found its foothold insecure. She gave a squeak as the tree began to go. Ross jumped out of the way.

The tree fell with a drawn-out noise exactly like the tipping of a load of slates. One second it was all noise, and the next there was complete silence.

He ran forward but could not get very near because of the far-flung branches. Right in the middle Demelza suddenly appeared, climbing with pawing movements among the branches. Prudie came flapping across from the stables, shouting, “My ivers! My ivers!”

Jack Cobbledick reached the girl first from his side, but they had to cut away some of the smaller branches before they could get her clothing free. She crawled out laughing. Her hands were scraped and her knees bleeding, the calf of one leg was interlaced with scratches but otherwise she had come to no harm.

Ross glowered at her. “You’ll do as I tell you in future. I want no broken limbs here.”

Her laughter faded before his glance. “No.” She licked the blood off one palm, then glanced down at her frock. “Dear life, I’ve breeked my dress.” She screwed her neck round at an impossible angle to see the back.

“Take the child and give her something for those cuts,” Ross said to Prudie. “She's beyond me now.”

In Trenwith House the evening moved towards its close.

When those guests had gone who were not staying the night, a flatness and lethargy fell on the house. The absence of wind and the glowing ashes of the great log fire made the hall unusually cosy, and five high-backed well-padded chairs supported a semicircle of relatives drinking port.

Upstairs in his great curtained bed Charles Poldark, at the end of his active life, took short and anxious gasps at the vitiated air which was all medical science allowed him. In another room farther along the west passage Geoffrey Charles, at the beginning of his active life, was taking in the nourishment his mother could offer him, with which medical science had not found a means to tamper.

During the last month Elizabeth had known all kinds of new sensations. The birth of her child had been the supreme experience of her life, and looking down now at the crown of Geoffrey Charles's fluffy pale head so close to her own white skin, she was filled with a frightening sense of pride and power and fulfillment. In the instant of his birth her existence was changed; she had accepted, had seized upon a life-long commission of motherhood, a proud and all-absorbing task beside which ordinary duties became void.

After a long period of great weakness, she had suddenly begun to pick up, and during the last week had felt as well as ever in her life. But she was dreamy, indolent, happy to lie a little longer and think about her son and gaze at him and let him sleep in the crook of her arm. It would have distressed her very much to feel that by staying in bed she was putting more responsibility on Verity, but she
could not yet summon up the resolve to break the spell of invalidism and move about as before. She could not bear the separation from her son.

This evening she lay in bed and listened to the sound of movement about the old house. During her illness, with her very quick ears she had come to identify every noise; each door made a different sound when opened: the treble and bass creak of unoiled hinges, the click and scrape of different latches, the loose board here and the uncarpeted patch there, so that she could follow the movements of everyone in the west part of the house.

Mrs. Tabb brought her supper, a slice of capon's breast, a coddled egg, and a glass of warm milk, and about nine Verity came in and sat for ten minutes. Verity had got over her disappointment very well, Elizabeth thought. A little quieter, a little more preoccupied with the life of the household. She had wonderful strength of mind and self-reliance. Elizabeth was grateful for her courage. She thought, quite wrongly, that she had very little herself, and admired it in Verity.

Father had opened his eyes once or twice, Verity said, and had been persuaded to swallow a mouthful of brandy. He did not seem to recognize anyone, but he was sleeping more easily and she had hopes. She was going to sit up in case he wanted anything. She would be able to doze in his armchair.

At ten Mrs. Chynoweth came upstairs and insisted on saying good night to her daughter. She talked in so determined a voice about poor Charles that she woke her grandson; then she stayed on talking while he was fed, a thing Elizabeth hated. But at last she was gone and the child asleep, and Elizabeth stretched her limbs in the bed and listened happily to Francis moving about in the room next to hers. Soon he would come in to say good night and then there would be a great stretch of darkness and peace until the early morning.

He came in, stepping with exaggerated care and pausing a moment to peer at the sleeping child, then he sat on the edge of the bed and took Elizabeth's hand.

“My poor wife, neglected as usual,” he said. “Your father has been talking for hours without a break on his grievances against Fox and Sheridan, while you have been up here alone missing all the delights of conversation.”

In his banter there was a certain amount of true feeling—he had been a little annoyed that she had come to bed so early—but at the sight of her his grudge vanished and his love returned.

For some minutes they talked in low tones, then he leaned forward to kiss her. She offered him her lips unthinkingly, and it was only when his arms went about her that she realized that tonight the friendly little salute would not do.

After a minute he sat back, smiled at her in rather a puzzled way.

“Is something wrong?”

She made a gesture towards the cot. “You’ll surely wake him, Francis.”

“Oh, he's new fed. He sleeps heavy then. You’ve told me so yourself.”

She said: “How is your father? Is he any better? Some how one does not feel—”

He shrugged, feeling himself put in the wrong. He was not happy at his father's collapse; he was not indifferent to the outcome; but that was something quite separate. The two conditions existed at the same time. Today he had carried her downstairs, lifting the weight of her, sorry that she was not heavier but happy to feel the substance under her frailty. From that moment the scent of her seemed to cling in his nostrils. Pretending to busy himself with the guests, he had really had eyes for no one else.

She said: “I’m not well tonight. Your father's illness upset me very much.”

He struggled with his feelings, trying to be reasonable. Like all proud men, he hated to be rebuffed in this way. It made him feel like a lascivious schoolboy. “Sometime,” he said, “will you feel well again?”

“That's not fair, Francis. It isn’t my choosing that I’m not very strong.”

“Nor mine.” Recollection of his restraint during these months bubbled up in him. That and other things. “I notice you didn’t frown or look faint at Ross this afternoon.”

Indignation flickered in her eyes. From the very beginning the things Ross had said to her had found excuse and justification in her mind. She had seen nothing of him and was sorry for him; during the months while her baby was coming she had thought a good deal of Ross, of his loneliness, of his pale eyes and wild scarred face. Like all human beings she could not refrain from idly comparing what she had with what she might have had.

“Please leave him out of this,” she said.

“How can I?” he rejoined, “when you will not.”

“What d’you mean? Ross is nothing to me.”

“Perhaps you’re beginning to regret it.”

“I think you must be drunk, Francis, to speak to me like this.”

“A splendid fuss you made of him this afternoon. ‘Ross, sit here beside me.’ ‘Ross, is my baby not pretty?’ ‘Ross, take a piece of that cake.’ Dear, dear, what a to-do.”

She said, almost too angry to speak: “You’re being utterly childish.”

Francis got up. “Ross, I am sure, would not be childish.”

She said, deliberately trying to hurt him back: “No, I’m sure he would not.”

They stared at each other.

“Well, that's pretty straight, isn’t it?” he said, and left her.

He flung into his own room, slamming the door without regard to the sick man or the sleeping child. Then he undressed anyhow, leaving his clothes on the floor, and got into bed.

He lay with his hands behind his head and eyes open for an hour or more before he went to sleep. He was consumed with disappointment and jealousy. All the love and desire in him had turned to bitterness and aridity and desolation.

There was no one to tell him that he was wrong in being jealous of Ross. There was no one to tell him that another and more powerful rival had recently arisen.

There was no one to warn him about Geoffrey Charles.

I
N THE GROWTH OF DEMELZA'S INTELLIGENCE ONE ROOM AT NAMPARA PLAYED a distinctive part. That room was the library.

It had taken her a long time to overcome her distrust of the gaunt and dusty lumber room, a distrust which derived from the one night she had spent in, or beside, the great box bed. She had found afterwards that the second door in that bedroom led through into the library, and some of the fear of that first hour stuck to the room beyond the second door.

But fear and fascination are yokefellows, oxen out of step but pulling in the same direction, and once inside the room she was never tired of returning to it. Since his return Ross had shunned the place because every article in it brought back memories of his childhood and of his mother and father and their voices and thoughts and forgotten hopes. For Demelza there were no memories, only discoveries.

Half the articles she had never seen before. For some of them even her ingenious brain could not invent a use, and so long as she could not read, the piled yellow papers and the little signs and labels scrawled and tied on certain articles were no help.

There was the figurehead of the
Mary Buckingham
, which had come ashore, Jud told her, in 1760, three days after Ross was born. She liked tracing the carving of this with her finger. There was the engraved sea chest from the little fore-and-aft schooner which had broken its back on Damsel Point, drifted upon Hendrawna Beach and darkened the sands and sand hills with coal dust for weeks afterwards. There were samples of tin and copper ore, many of them lacking labels and all useless anyhow. There were spare strips of canvas for patching sails, and four ironbound chests at whose contents she could only guess. There was
a grandfather's clock with some of its inside missing—she spent hours over this with the weights and wheels, trying to discover how it could have worked.

There was a coat of mail armour, terribly rusty and antique, two rag dolls and a homemade rocking horse, six or seven useless muskets, a spinet which had once belonged to Grace, two French snuffboxes and a music box, a roll of moth-eaten tapestry from some other ship, a miner's pick and shovel, a storm lantern, a half keg of blasting powder, a sketch map pinned on the wall of the extent of Grambler workings in 1765.

Of all the discoveries, the most exciting to her were the spinet and the music box. One day, after an hour's tinkering, she persuaded the music box to work, and it played two thin trembling minuets. In excitement and triumph she danced all round the instrument on one leg, and Garrick, thinking this a new game, jumped round too and bit a piece out of her skirt. Then when the music was over she hurriedly went and hid in a corner lest someone should have heard it and come and find them there. A greater discovery was the spinet, but this had the drawback that she could not make it play a tune. Once or twice when she was sure there was no one about she ventured to try, and the sounds fascinated her even when they were discordant. She found herself perversely taken with such sounds and wanting to hear them again and again. One day she discovered that the farther her fingers moved to the right the thinner became the sound, and this seemed to give the puzzle away. She felt it would be much simpler to conjure tunes out of this than to make sense of the horrible spidery trails that people called writing.